Geraldine A. Johnson received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale, an MA in Art History from Cambridge, and a PhD in History of Art from Harvard. She has been awarded a number of prestigious grants and fellowships, including from the Harvard Society of Fellows, Leverhulme Trust, Henry Moore Foundation, Fulbright Commission, Mellon Foundation, and Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti in Florence. In 2026, she is a Visiting Professor (Professeur Invitée) at the Sorbonne's Centre André Chastel (CNRS) in Paris.
She has served four times as Head of Oxford's History of Art Department and is currently an Elected Member of the University's Governing Council. She has also been Associate Head of Oxford's Humanities Division and has held a number of senior positions at her Oxford college (Christ Church), including Senior Censor (Academic Head and Co-Deputy Head of College), Junior Censor (oversight of welfare), and Tutor for Admissions. She received a University Teaching Prize for her work in establishing Oxford's undergraduate degree in History of Art.
She has published widely on the history of sculpture from the late medieval period to the present day, as well as on the visual arts more generally in Early Modern Europe. Her research interests also include the history of photography, the historiography of Art History, and women and the visual arts.
She is the co-editor of a prize-winning volume, Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1997), and editor of a ground-breaking collection, Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Oxford University Press published her Very Short Introduction to Renaissance Art in 2005, with a new edition appearing in 2010 from an imprint of Barnes & Noble. It has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Romanian, Turkish, Thai, and Vietnamese, with a second edition currently in progress. Her articles have appeared in major peer-reviewed journals including Art History, The Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Sculpture Journal.
Most recently, she published a field-defining edited collection of 30 essays entitled Art History Now: Objects, Concepts, Approaches (Routledge, 2026), as well as a co-edited volume, Photo Archives and the Place of Photography (Routledge, 2025). Her monograph, Sculpted by Light: Photography and Sculpture, will be published by Reaktion Books in association with the University of Chicago Press in 2027. With Dr Leah Clark, she is co-curating a major international loan exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Renaissance Worlds: Art & the Senses, opening in June 2027 with an accompanying catalogue and academic conference. She is now working on two further monographs, The Sound of Marble: The Materiality and Immateriality of Italian Renaissance Sculpture, and Art History's Images: From Wölfflin to Krauss.
She is on the Editorial Board of Amsterdam University Press's Renaissance History, Art and Culture series and she has recently completed a stint on the Editorial Board of Art History, one of the leading journals in the field. She has also served as a consultant for a major Anglo-Italian television series, Medici: Masters of Florence (Series 2 & 3), which was distributed by Netflix and broadcast on five continents, and she is currently consulting for a new BBC Arts series, Ingenious Human. Beyond her academic interests, she is the Chair of an Oxford-based charity that supports projects in the Global South focusing on health, education and welfare.
